


Code Name Jeanne

by bookishandbossy



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Alternate Universe - World War II, F/M, Happy Ending, felt like I should make that clear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28825554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Jyn Erso lives by a few simple rules.  She takes the most dangerous missions her superior at the SOE is willing to give her.  She never speaks of what her life was like before the war.  She always works alone. So when the SOE sends her Captain Cassian Andor in the late winter of 1944, she eyes him like he's a bomb. (WWII AU)
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 18
Kudos: 100





	Code Name Jeanne

Jyn Erso lives by a few simple rules. She takes the most dangerous missions her superior at the SOE is willing to give her. She never speaks of what her life was like before the war. She always works alone. And at the SOE, filled with people whose pasts may be checkered but who are willing to do just about anything to defeat the Axis, she fits right in. They understand each other, her and these people who she knows only by code names and messages left in dead letter drops, who she meets in fleeting seconds in cafes and country roads, who sneak her information and explosives and equipment. She's been running a spy network out of occupied France for almost two and a half years and she's lasted longer than most but she's well aware that all it would take for her to vanish into a Gestapo cell is trusting the wrong person. So she works alone and the list of people who know her real identity is breathtakingly short. Everyone who knows her know this. So when the SOE sends her Captain Cassian Andor in the late winter of 1944, she eyes him like he's a bomb. 

He knows all the right code phrases and he has a letter written in the cipher that she only uses with her superior and knowledge that could only come from the SOE. And she doesn't trust him. 

“It's riskier to have two of us here,” she says to him about a week after his arrival. They're camped out in the abandoned barn that they transmit from while Kay, the finicky radio operator Cassian brought along with him, tries to get a signal. “I'm fine on my own.”

“I know. They briefed me on the network before I left. Nicely done.” He inclines his head towards hers. “You've blown up a lot of bridges and rail lines. But we can blow up more with the two of us.”

“They're planning something big,” she says flatly. She only knows what she needs to know. It's the way that this works: bits and pieces of information doled out to all the various agents and networks so no one has the full picture. If she gets captured—well, if she gets captured, she has a cyanide pill she's supposed to swallow—but if she doesn't manage to get to it in time and the Germans manage to get anything out of her, it won't be enough to damn everyone. The network she's run will scatter and dissolve, the maquis groups she leaves orders for will take them from the next operative the SOE sends, and she will vanish. Jyn's made her peace with that long ago. But in the last few months, she's sensed a change. Her orders come more frequently; the resistance groups she works with have grown bolder, less clandestine; the things she asks for come more easily. Something is happening and she'll know what her part in it is the moment she needs to and not a minute sooner. 

“They are. I know about as much as you do. But if I had to guess, I'd say they're going to invade France.” The last two words are a whisper, barely audible, and they send a shock through her. 

“An invasion.” She tests the words out against her tongue, rolling the shape of them around her mouth, and it seems almost as impossible as if he'd told her that a pegasus was about to land in the cornfield this barn is moored in. She knows—she hopes—that it's coming someday. But from the first moment she parachuted down into occupied France, the only thing she's allowed herself to think of is the next mission, the next message to send and explosion to set, the next radio operator and courier she'll use until they're worn out. She's been in the war so long that the idea of an end to it is almost too massive for her mind to hold. 

“In the spring, maybe. I don't know.” He shrugs and leans back against the boards of the barn, slowly stretching in one direction and the other. The muscles in his shoulders bunch and shift underneath the thin fabric of his shirt. She realizes that she's staring and looks away, a red flush creeping up her neck. He's handsome, objectively speaking. It's just that she thought she was past noticing things like that.

“Sounds like we'll need some more explosives,” is what she finally says. “I have a source.”

He nods to her and they don't say anything else while Kay finishes transmitting. Then they scatter, all three of them leaving for different locations, and she's left with a tentative flame of something inside her. It wavers and flickers and occasionally teeters on the edge of going out but she suspects that it's hope. 

The next time that she sees him, he's sitting a few rows away from her in a train, waiting for the right moment for her to pass a message to him, the weak winter sunlight catching on the lines of his face. He smiles at her when no one is looking and it's barely a smile, just a corner of his lips pulling upwards as their fingers brush and she presses a piece of silk with a cipher on it into his hand, and that flame inside her leaps higher. She doesn't understand it. She doesn't have the space in her mind to even try understanding it.

The time after that, they're setting charges on a deserted stretch of railway line and they work in perfect silence. When they're finally finished, they retreat into the woods and wait for the wire to creep, still not saying a word to each other. Then there's a burst of sparks and smoke and the sound of metal snapping in two and they turn and run, fast and far as they can.

“You were right,” she says when they're far enough away. “We can blow up more when it's the two of us.”

“How'd you learn all of this?” he asks, sweeping his arm between them, and she knows that he means the explosives, the ciphers, the French she uses both to charm and as a shield, the tricks of the craft that she uses to navigate her way through every day. “I picked it up in the army but you—where did you come from?”

“I grew up in Paris—my mother was French and almost all her family lived there--so I've spoken French since I was very young.” It's the most she's told anyone about herself in years. “The SOE trained me a bit, before I went into the field. The rest I learned.”

“Dual citizenship?” 

She nods. It's a prized trait among the agents that the SOE sends into France and probably the first thing that made them look twice at her when she first called the number given to her by a friend of a friend, angry and lost and desperate to do something besides sit in her tiny flat in London behind blackout shades. Her marksmanship skills were likely the second. 

“Where did you come from?” she asks, echoing him. He owes her that now that she's given him a glimpse at her. Jyn's learned to control her face when she talks about Paris, not to let herself be overcome by memories of the apartment on the Right Bank that had roses climbing up the courtyard walls in the spring and the baker down the street who slipped her an extra croissant on Saturdays and the Roths down the block, whose daughter Hannah she played elaborate games of make believe with and who had her come over on Fridays to turn on their lights when the sun went down. (She doesn't know exactly what happened to the Roths when the Germans came. She doesn't know if she wants to know.) But she suspects that he can still see something in her face, even in the dark, that Captain Cassian Andor is much better at reading people than she would like him to be. That he knows there's a thousand things she's not saying in between the few sentences she's offered him. 

“Mexico. I went over to Spain during the civil war to fight for the Republicans. One of the men I fought with went into British intelligence and brought me in when the war began.” And there are a thousand things he's not saying in between those words too. She heard stories about what it was like in the Spanish civil war, saw the articles and photos and shuddered at the wreckage, never imagining that it could touch them until it did. 

“Why not go back home?” she asks. 

“I could ask the same of you. They let me have a look at your file back in London—you could have gone back to England half a dozen times if you'd wanted to.” He's looking at her—she can feel it even in the dark—and she fights back the urge to tug at the worn hem of her shirt.

She shrugs. “There's nothing for me there. And I couldn't—I had to do something. This is what they let me do.”

Jyn gets the sense that he understands her perfectly. 

They make a good team, as it turns out. He has the military experience that she lacks and the French resistance troops that eye a woman with suspicion snap to attention at his orders. She has an endless network of contacts whose information they use to cut telephone lines and set off explosion after explosion. Bridges and rail lines and buildings and the occasional car carrying a high-ranking Nazi officer go up in flames. Official communications go mysteriously missing and pieces of machinery suddenly stop working. He knows how to carry out effective attacks with a small number of men. She knows how to spot which locals might be useful to their cause and which would turn them over to the Germans without blinking. The numbers of men under his command and spies that she manages grow and grow. They meet every week or so and pass strategies back and forth until they get in the habit of finishing each other's thoughts. And, as the winter gives way to spring and the messages from Baker Street grow more and more frequent, the sense that something big is coming only becomes more certain by the day.

“What do you think we'll do if it works?” she asks him while they're waiting for another transmission alongside Kay, who's lasted much longer than she ever expected him to. “After?”

What do soldiers like them do when there's no war, she means.

“Build a new kind of life,” he says softly. “A better one.”

And he smiles at her and her heart swells in her chest and the breath freezes in her lungs and she—Cassian has a brilliant smile. She can't imagine how she ever went without seeing it. 

After she sees him smile, she starts letting more things slip. Some of them aren't even things she says. It's the creative ways she has of sweetening what they pretend is tea in wartime or the old wound on her thigh that's healed but still aches when the wind blows a certain way or how easily she can imitate someone else's handwriting, because she wants to show off for him a little. And he notices. He brings her a tiny twist of sugar that he very definitely stole from somewhere and slows his pace when she reaches down to rub at her thigh and looks at her with admiration whenever they have something new to forge. And he starts letting things slip too: lapsing back into Spanish when he's tired and telling her the words that have no direct translation into English, the ones that he misses hearing; reciting plot summaries of the movies he managed to see in London, his love for them evident in every word; showing her how he manages to slip through the forest so quietly. And she takes everything that he's willing to give her. 

As spring slips into summer, Baker Street sends them more people and instructions to cut the railway line between Paris and Bordeaux. They get another courier, a slender, impossibly young man named Bodhi Rook who shakes for a good ten minutes after jumping out of a plane to land in a sympathetic farmer's field but spends endless days and nights crossing France by train to carry messages without a hint of nerves. They get a pair of specially trained demolition experts too, Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, who come with a pack stuffed full of fresh supplies and work in perfect concert together, one's hand like the extension of the other's. More people to help and more people for her—for them—to keep safe. 

It's like they're in a fast car, speeding along blind turn after blind turn, and all they can do at each turn is go faster. But there's something exhilarating about it too and sometimes Jyn thinks that if they're in a fast car, she wants to throw her head back and let her hair get tangled by the wind. 

The night before the Allies are set to land on the beaches of Normandy, she kisses him in the woods. She was kissed a handful of times before the war, sweet and gentle pecks from boys she went walking in the park or around the Seine with. There's nothing gentle about the way she kisses Cassian now, hands knotted in the collar of his shirt to pull him towards her, her teeth biting at his lower lip, and there's nothing gentle about the way he kisses her back either. Then she's yanking at the buttons of his shirt and the buckle of his belt and he's kissing down her neck as he presses her against the trunk of the nearest tree and she wraps her legs around his waist. It's stupid and reckless and if she dies tomorrow, she wants it to be one of her last memories. She wants to feel alive, she thinks, and his hands and mouth make her feel more alive than anything else. They both keep their eyes open the entire time, like they can't bear to look away from each other. 

When she gets shot, the bullet's not even meant for her. It's a few days after the invasion and they're defending their camp from a group of Germans who attacked during the middle of the day. She's perched up in a tree, picking people off, and a shot goes far and wide, whistling through the leaves, and hits her in the shoulder. And there's white hot pain and blood, more blood than there should be. And she's clinging to the branches of the tree with one hand and she feels her head slumping back against the trunk and hears a volley of shots. There's Cassian's voice screaming her name and blackness stealing in at the edges of her vision and then nothing.

When she wakes up, everything is white. Sheets, pillows, the nurse clad in starchy linen hovering above her. She struggles against the sheets, tossing and turning and finally fighting her way free to glare up at the nurse. 

“Where is he?” she demands. “Captain Andor?”

“That's classified,” the nurse says, not unsympathetically. 

“Well, where am I?” She thinks she should have asked that first but she couldn't help it. She wants to see him, she _needs_ to see him, and the desperation surging through her is more than a little terrifying. Jyn Erso knows desperate very well. So well, in fact, that she thought she knew every permutation of it. She's been desperate for food, desperate for ammunition, desperate for a hiding spot, desperate for a bit of luck, desperate to make it through one more night. But she's never been desperate for a person before. 

“Back in England. They're not letting you back into the field with that wound in your shoulder, I'm afraid. You'd better let me have a look at that dressing now.” The nurse waits, arms crossed against her chest, until Jyn rolls over and presents her with the wounded shoulder. She wants to ask a dozen other things, ask about how she got here and how the war's going, argue that really, she does need to be back in the field and they obviously got the bullet out so she'll be fine in a few days but she's so tired and every part of her hurts. 

“Wait,” she says when she feels herself floating back into sleep, the room already going hazy around her. “Can you tell me if he's alive? Captain Andor?”

“I'll find out for you,” the nurse says. Jyn suspects that she pities her and she hates it. 

The next day, there's a note on the lunch tray they bring her, written in the neat copperplate she recognizes as belonging to her section head: _He's alive_. She sleeps better after that. 

She reads about the liberation of Paris in the newspapers and when the ink starts blurring before her eyes, she's shocked to realize that she's crying. She can't remember the last time she did that. The Allies push across Europe and into Germany and the months slip by and she leaves the hospital and goes back to the SOE, mostly code work. Every so often, she'll stumble across a report from Cassian that she suspects someone briefly leaves lying around so she can read it or there'll be a message waiting on her desk that she knows is from him even though it's unsigned, confirmation that he's still alive. _He's still alive he's still alive he's still alive._ It echoes in the ring of her heels on the cobblestones as she walks to work, in the clink of her spoon as she tries to coax another cup of tea out of her tiny ration of tea leaves, in the scratch of her pen as she works out ciphers. It's there when she makes her way through the dark streets in the morning and when she stares up at the ceiling at night searching for sleep. And it's something. Not everything, but it's something. 

And then one day, he's there, waiting outside her shabby little flat in Bloomsbury. His hair is hopelessly long and overgrown and he has a new scar slicing across his neck and shoulder but he's there and Jyn stops dead in the street at the sight of him. Then he's running and she's running too and they collide into each other and she kisses him just as fiercely as she did in the woods. 

“We're almost to the after,” she says much later, when they're lying curled up together in her narrow bed, his heart beating underneath her ear. “What do we do then?”

“I'm not sure,” he admits and she can hear the same ghosts that haunt her at night in his voice. “But I want to find out what it is. If you...”

“I do,” she tells him. Even now, she's not entirely sure what she's promising to him, how they'll find their way out of the habits of wartime and settle into whatever kind of peace people like them get. But she knows that she wants to promise it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of my decades project, where I'm writing a fic for each decade of the 20th century--come say hi over on Tumblr if you want to know what other fics/pairings I'm writing!


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